"Bomb Cyclone" Expected to Hit US East Coast Tomorrow, Plunging Temperatures Lower Than Those of Mars

(CNN)A massive "bombogenesis" -- an area of rapidly declining low pressure -- will wreak havoc on the Northeast this week, threatening hurricane-force winter wind gusts in a region already crippled by deadly cold.

The bombogenesis will result in what's known as a "bomb cyclone." And the bomb cyclone, expected to strike Thursday, will likely dump 6 to 12 inches of snow in New
By the end of this week, parts of the Northeast will be colder than Mars.

Bombogenesis is said to occur when a storm's central barometric pressure drops at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. (A millibar is a way of measuring pressure.) The lower the pressure, the more powerful the storm.

The word is a combination of cyclogenesis, which describes the formation of a cyclone or storm, and bomb, which is, well, pretty self-explanatory.

"This can happen when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters," NOAA said. "The formation of this rapidly strengthening weather system is a process called bombogenesis, which creates what is known as a bomb cyclone."

In the 1940s, some meteorologists began informally calling some big coastal storms "bombs" because they develop "with a ferocity we rarely, if ever, see over land," said Fred Sanders, a retired MIT professor, who brought the term into common usage by describing such storms in a 1980 article in the journal Monthly Weather Review